ACH, DIESE LÜCKE, DIESE ENTSETZLICHE LÜCKE – When Loss Inhabits a Villa in Nymphenburg

Simon Verhoeven, who wrote the screenplay and directed, has a personal connection to this material that runs deeper than most director-source relationships. Senta Berger, who plays Inge, is his mother. Michael Verhoeven, his father, a filmmaker and producer, died in April 2024 — a year before shooting began.

Verhoeven has said in interviews that his father's death changed the work on Ach, diese Lücke: "You are more vulnerable, you have different antennae, you are more sensitive, you are set deeper." His mother called the shoot "a beautiful anaesthesia" — because the pain does not go away, but work gives it a form.

You do not need to know this backstory to understand the film. But you feel it. Verhoeven stages the grandparent scenes with a warmth that never tips into sentimentality, and with a precision that suggests someone describing rooms he knows. The villa, the rituals, the juxtaposition of divahood and frailty — these are not sets, they are inhabited memories. That the FAZ described the adaptation as Verhoeven's "own family constellation" hits the mark.

Senta Berger, nominated as Best Leading Actress, plays Inge with a mixture of grandeur and fragility that astonishes, because she does not cross the line between caricature and portrait but balances on it. Inge is a former actress who has carried the gestures of the grand stage into everyday life: she calls her grandson "darling", she stages every meal, she drinks with the elegance of a woman who never understood drinking as a problem but as style. Berger shows all of this without exposing Inge. You laugh at this woman, and in the next moment you grasp that the eccentricity is a shield against disappearing.

Michael Wittenborn, nominated as Best Supporting Actor, plays Hermann as the film's quiet centre of gravity. Where Inge commands the stage, Hermann inhabits the study: a man who has thought his whole life and now, in old age, sets his sentences down more slowly. Wittenborn's Hermann is stern but not cold; distant but capable of a tenderness that shows itself in individual gestures — reading the Werther quote aloud, a hand on his wife's arm, the look he gives his grandson as though searching for something he has lost himself. Together, Berger and Wittenborn deliver what one critic described as "the perfect embodiment of an ageing couple between outer rigidity and innermost intimacy".

Bruno Alexander, nominated as Best Leading Actor, has the hardest task: to play a young man who does not yet know who he is — and to do so in front of a camera that usually observes people who do. Alexander, who became known through Die Discounter and began in the children's series Pfefferkörner, makes Joachim not a charming anti-hero but an observer who watches himself observing. He plays insecurity not as a pose but as a ground state. In the acting-school scenes — the instructor, played by Karoline Herfurth, tells him to "smile with his nipples" — Alexander's Joachim is funny because he does not try to be. And in the scenes with the grandparents he develops a vulnerability that carries the film without crushing it.

The predecessor adaptation — Wann wird es endlich wieder so, wie es nie war by Sonja Heiss, 2023 — was entertaining and lavishly appointed but, as some critics noted, remained too often on the surface. Verhoeven takes one step further without sacrificing the entertainment value. His film is a coming-of-age story that is simultaneously a farewell story: Joachim arrives in life while his grandparents are leaving it. The symmetry is not contrived; it lies in the material. Verhoeven has the wisdom not to display it but to let it happen.

There are films that make your own life deeper — one critic phrased it that way, and it sounds like one of those lines you print on posters. But for Ach, diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke it is true, because that is exactly what the film does: it shows loss not as catastrophe but as condition. The void the title names — Goethe's Werther meant the longing for love, Meyerhoff means the dead brother, Verhoeven perhaps means the dead father — is not filled. It is inhabited. With gargling exercises, whiskey hours and the stoic refusal to give up life just because it hurts.

Whether the academy honours this achievement with Lolas on 29 May is open. Verhoeven competes in Best Director against İlker Çatak and Mascha Schilinski — against Gelbe Briefe and In die Sonne schauen, two films more formally ambitious and politically urgent. But Ach, diese Lücke has something that none of its competitors offers in this form: an emotional generosity that does not shy away from speaking of the happiness that lies in passing. And a cast that redeems that generosity in every scene.

Senta Berger was unable to attend the premiere after a serious fall. Verhoeven said she was doing better. The film goes on. The void remains. And somebody is gargling.